Jenny Willier Murphy, a Senior Justice Advisor with the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs Office of Criminal Justice Assistance and Partnerships (INL/CAP), U.S. Department of State since 2012, has over 20 years of experience working on international rule of law issues, ranging from justice sector reform to capital markets development. In addition to her experience at INL, Ms. Murphy has experience working at USAID, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and BearingPoint. While she has dedicated much of her career to working on rule of law issues in Latin America—including Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador—she has worked in a range of other countries, such as Niger and Albania.
Having worked on issues in criminal law, civil law, and commercial law, Ms. Murphy believes that practitioners must understand how all three interact in order to effect meaningful change in a legal system. When Ms. Murphy began her career as a lawyer in the 1990s, much international legal assistance focused on frameworks for capitalist development in the former Soviet Union. After seeing the interplay of commercial law with other areas of law in the former Soviet Union and other regions, however, Ms. Murphy began to gain an appreciation for understanding legal systems as a whole. While at USAID, for example, she witnessed ways in which disputes over land rights, particularly with regard to land titling, can lead to criminal behavior and end up in criminal courts. “You need to know what issues impact or can be drivers of criminality so you can make recommendations,” she cautions. “It is very hard to operate exclusively on criminal justice issues without taking into account the greater system that they are in.”
Ms. Murphy also emphasizes the value of understanding local context in a host country, including legal context, political context, and cultural context. Over the course of her career, she has been surprised by the number of U.S. consultants working on legal reform in the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Iraq and Afghanistan, and other parts of the world who did not understand the basic philosophical underpinnings of those regions’ respective legal systems. “Many of them,” she says, “did not understand the roles of judges, juries (if they existed), prosecutors, or defense attorneys. If you do not understand these things, how do you apply best practices of common law to a civil law system, or to customary or religious law?” She advises practitioners to read everything they can about the countries in which they work, learn the local language(s), and be humble. She notes that these are some of the best strategies for dealing with a lack of political will in a host country. Ms. Murphy believes that the United States has grown more sensitive to diverse legal traditions, particularly through the experience of legal reform in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that there is still work to do. For example, she notes that most legal reform assistance in Latin America continues to focus on formal institutions, despite the prevalence of customary law among indigenous populations.
Finally, Ms. Murphy notes the importance of understanding donor priorities. “The issues confronting the justice sector are the same,” she says, “regardless of who the implementer is. To be a good practitioner, you need to be very cognizant of who the donors are and develop relationships with them.” She was reminded of this lesson in 2009 when conducting a rule of law assessment in Nicaragua. A charity organization had received a $50,000 grant to implement a three-year project in which the charity would support a local lawyer and secretary to mediate all the minor disputes in a small town, so that the police could focus on more serious crimes. The project was very successful, despite its small budget, but the funding was ultimately cut because the implementer had not built a mechanism for sustainability—a key donor priority—into the project. “It’s sad,” Ms. Murphy says, “because it was a cheap program with a high impact, but because there was no sustainability plan, it floundered. This is emblematic of many cases I’m aware of.”
Ms. Murphy now contributes her knowledge and experience as the Grants Officer Representative to JUSTRAC. She is instrumental in guiding the development of JUSTRAC’s training programs and symposia, which seek to increase the efficacy of justice sector reform work by addressing the issues Ms. Murphy has noted here.